The entire disclosure of Japanese Patent Application No. 2012-086205, filed Apr. 5, 2012, is expressly incorporated by reference herein.
1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a liquid removing device which removes liquid attached to a cap and a liquid ejecting apparatus including the liquid removing device.
2. Related Art
In the related art, as a type of a liquid ejecting apparatus which ejects liquid from a liquid ejecting head onto a target, an ink jet type printer is widely known. Usually, the printer is capable of performing a cleaning operation which forcedly sucks and discharges the ink from a nozzle of a liquid ejecting head to the inside of a cap, in a state where the cap abuts the nozzle forming surface so as to surround the nozzle of the liquid ejecting head.
However, when the printer performs the cleaning operation, a portion of the ink filled inside the cap attaches to a lip section abutting the nozzle forming surface of the liquid ejecting head in the cap. As a result, after that, the lip section of the cap may not airtightly come into contact with the nozzle forming surface of the liquid ejecting head. In addition, in the recent years, a printer provided with a mechanism for removing the ink attached to the lip section of the cap has been proposed.
For example, in the printer disclosed in JP-A-2010-23453, first, a carriage is moved so that a liquid ejecting head mounted on the carriage crosses an upper side of s wiper member. Then, the ink attached to the nozzle forming surface of the liquid ejecting head when the cleaning operation is performed is removed by wiping operation of the wiper member. After that, the cap is raised and the lip section of the cap abuts the nozzle forming surface of the liquid ejecting head by driving a lifting-lowering unit which lifts and lowers the cap in a direction approaching and separating from the nozzle forming surface of the liquid ejecting head. As a result, the ink attached to the lip section of the cap is removed by being transferred to the nozzle forming surface of the liquid ejecting head.
However, generally, in order to wipe and remove easily the ink attached to the nozzle forming surface of the liquid ejecting head, a water-repellent treatment is subjected to the nozzle forming surface of the liquid ejecting head. In this case, in the printer described above, there is a problem that the ink cannot be efficiently transferred from the lip section of the cap to the nozzle forming surface of the liquid ejecting head having low affinity for the ink.